Pirates of the Burning Sea Site - Dev Log

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Flying Lab's John Tynes takes his turn to provide a status report, focusing on creation of the Caribbean gameworld.

By IGN Staff

In a new addition to his Dev Log today, team member John Tynes talks about recent progress in a few different areas. The first couple of paragraphs are below to give you an indication of what he has been doing:

Island Tunes I spent the last few weeks working on game design, writing and revising a bunch of specs. The story engine is done (actually, I should say "done"), for starters. It isn't as ambitious as I was originally hoping, but on the other hand its gameplay value has been ratched up substantially over what I expected. The mission system I designed is entirely dynamic and has a great deal of variety, and it'll mean a lot of cool gameplay.

As Taylor noted in his dev log, we spent several days doing time trails for two of our ships, trying to tune factors such as wind speed, ship speed vs. wind, turning rate, and so forth. We aren't done, but we made some good progress and were able to ground the whole sailing system in real-world measurements.

The immediate goal of that process was to settle, once and for all (I mean, "for all"), what our world scale is going to be. To do this we needed to get a handle on ship speed, to make quick judgements about how fast it felt to sail past one of our islands, to sail between islands, and so on. In the end we decided to keep our original scale of 1/10th for the island terrain, but the distances between islands will be arbitrary. We'll start with a scale of 1/10th or so and then make adjustments to individual islands until the experience of sailing from place to place feels right.

The game is not expected to be realistic when it comes to sailing speeds; the developers don't feel that taking several hours to sail between islands would be much fun. - Jonric